Friday, March 03, 2006

Back in December, the Baron wrote a post in which he mentioned Samuel Huntington’s well-known quote about Islam’s “bloody borders”. The imagery was graphic and startling. In my ignorance, I asked the Baron if he could draw a simple map delineating these boundaries. I wanted to be able to see these “fault lines”. I wanted to see if a pictorial representation would help me better to understand the reach and the destruction of what the Islamofascists have wrought.

The Baron reminded me that no such map could be made. Islamic terrorism takes place among, between, and inside many countries. The constant, vicious, lethal storm of Islamist violence stretches from equatorial Africa and the Barbary coast, across the Holy Land and the Arabian heartland, snaking through the mountains and plains of South Asia, making its way along the littoral of Indochina and the Indian Ocean, and ending in the archipelagos of the Pacific Rim.

Remember when we heard about “The New World Order”? Few of us envisioned a world order straight from the gates of hell. On that beautiful September day in 2001, the sky a deep cerulean blue, we watched bodies, people, people like you and me, leaping, jumping arm-in-arm, sailing through space. We never saw them land.

Everyone has his own interior landscape of that September day. For many of us, September 12th was indeed the commencement of a New World Order. It was not an order founded on innocence or optimism or platitudes. It had become a world of resolve in the face of uncertainty. Whatever happened, we would not go quietly again.

We are well past the hopes and fears of the 20th century. The atomic Armageddon so endlessly prophesied died in silence. The old ideologies belong to the ages. We have come to some new, yet equally terrible, darkling plain.

Where there were previously two superpowers and three “worlds”, we have now, instead, a roiling, ever-changing political and religious battle. Who could have predicted, when Francis Fukuyama so dismissively consigned history to its own dustbin, that only a few years later new historical battle lines would be drawn? Who, reading the End of History, could have foreseen the Bush Doctrine?

Samuel Huntington proposes that, in the coming war between cultures, we will be confronted with “the West against the rest.” Leaving aside the inherent simplistic reduction here, he does have a point. If, by “the rest”, he means those who have no shared history with the West — that is, who do not spring from its essentially Judaeo-Christian foundations, nor partake of its Greco-Roman understanding of the law — he does have a point.

However, many of the previously colonized cultures have adopted and adapted this essentially Western Weltanschauung. One could include, for example, Japan, or India.

Differences among cultures are not inherently conflictual. The growing alliance between Japan and the West is born of Japan’s fear of China, and the West’s need for an ally in that part of the world. A developed, Westernized, and cohesive ally.

Of particular interest to Gates of Vienna are the cultural clashes which Islam has created as it comes up against whatever it considers “foreign”. Think of it as a kind of cultural spontaneous combustion. This has been a perennial problem for Islam, one which was resolved in its favor several times through brute force, before the gradual decline of the Muslim world. Were it not for petroleum, Islam might have vanished. Now, however, its more powerful tribes float on a sea of luxury while the “Arab street” wallows in its own uncollected garbage.

At the moment, in early 2006, Islam’s infiltration of other cultures, its demand for the dhimmification of others, and its absolutist and utopian visions, have created a long fault line of chronic bloody terrorism.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Baron explained the difficulties inherent in making any map encompassing what I wanted to see. To be accurate, his cartography would have to include the ongoing quotidian massacres that have occurred and continue behind the screen erected by the legacy media, the screen on which they display the bread and circuses meant to trivialize and distract. What does it matter that thirty Hindus died in Kashmir today, or that 350 women were raped in Darfur, when there is the serious matter of Paris Hilton videos to be considered?

As Providence would have it, late in December the Baron discovered a series of tables at The Religion of Peace (TROP) showing the location and casualties for every Islamic terrorist attack since September 11th. “All you have to do,” I told the Baron, “is put those little numbers on a map.” He didn’t say anything for a long time. Now I understand his silence; in fact, I find it rather admirable. As it turned out, what I wanted took him well over a hundred hours of his spare time to complete… The things we do for love…

Here’s how he did it: he used the more than 1,300 place names from TROP and matched them to various online maps and gazetteers, particularly Falling Rain. The locations in Iraq, Pakistan, and India were particularly difficult to match, due to wildly varying spellings. The results were collected in a database, and then he wrote hundreds of lines of program code to create the images, learning the rudiments of Macromedia Flash MX to build the animation. Meanwhile, having had the time to repent in leisure, I learned the hard wisdom of being careful about what you ask for.

Those endless hours hunched over the keyboard staring at the names of villages in Hindi and Urdu and Arabic and Tagalog has left the Baron’s eyesight a little worse for the wear. Never mind; his labors produced a wonder. You cannot watch the display representing the ongoing murderous intent of so many groups, all of them under the umbrella of a brutally insane worldview, without realizing with a sinking heart what we are up against. Every time a little flash goes off, lives wink out.

And so we come now to what I call The Bloody Borders Project. Or, on my bad days, “that bloody Bloody Borders Project.” Perhaps, as you view it, you too will be changed by what you see. You are seeing it because of all those falling bodies in New York City on that September day in 2001. How ignorant we were not to know that bodies had been falling, falling for years, all along those bloody borders.

Note: the Baron intends to update the Project every month, as time permits, with new data provided by TROP. The maps shown here and at The Bloody Borders Project cover incident data through February 22, 2006.

Warning: The animation file is over 8MB in size. It is difficult, if not impossible, to load and view with a slow dialup, such as ours.

Everyone should note that we are aware of a problem with the Flash animation involving the Mac. We will work to resolve it.

Also, Minh-Duc points out that the origin of the phrase “bloody borders” lies with V.S. Naipaul, from his book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, and not Samuel Huntington. We always suspected that there was a prior author for the quote; it’s good to know who it was. Thank you, Minh-Duc.

It's about time somebody began to document the lines of islamic terrorist activity in this world of ours. The collective result shows that which is forgotten in the 'here and now' headlines that we are so often subjected to.

An admirable piece of work Baron. My utmost respect for the amount of effort and time that this must cost, and please continue with it.I feel that if you don't, noone else will.

A thought just occured to me. Is it possible, with all the talk of "peak oil" and the demise of the oil economy, that the arab muslims have an extra incentive to islamise as much of the world as possible - before the oil, and their funding with it, runs out? Or perhaps more accurately before the world shifts itself on to alternatives such as ethanol and nuclear power.

I'll believe the "peak oil" phenomenon when it arrives...right now, there's a 2 million barrels a day surplus being pumped...

BTW, the Baron does intend to keep adding to the chart as time goes on. Probably once a month. The ROP site and several others keep good records. The problem is, of course, reconciling them because of the phonetic variations in English...i think that's what took so many hours. But just a month's worth will seem doable by comparison!

i caught it over at Pat Santy's (Dr. Sanity's)blog...and posted this comment in reply:______________________________This Map ofthe 2006 Cartoon War violenceis a nice companionto the map you are compliing.

This is an amazing post, and I'm totally impressed with the amount of work and dedication you put into this. My hat's off to you both.

I'm doing a week-long examination of terrorism, and would like to include your posts (this and White Space). If you have any objection, feel free to post it here (I'll check before going live) or email me. Otherwise, I appreciate your insights, and look forward to reading more from you in the future.

I smell right-wing here and anti-Islam and plenty of prejudice. This is preaching to a crowd of people who...

a/think Islamo-fascism exists and

b/are clearly bigoted towards Islam

Your research and graph is very nice but proves nothing, many of the acts of terror you talk of are carried out by a wide range of groups, not a single Islamic force. Many of these 'acts of terror' are in fact acts of freedom fighting, circumstances vary but you are genralising all the data to fit your view of this Islam vs Christianity tinfoil hat wearing madness you are clearly buying into.

Shall we make graphs of US acts of terror? Shall we make graphs of UK acts of terror showing the volume killed? We would see a lot more hot spots there.

Isolating this dubious data only enables you to fit it to your agenda and your agenda is one of the bigot, of capturing a whole religion in a nice, bit-size packet of hate that follows your personal agenda.

I'll say this, I have no fear of Islam but a fear of the UK and US governments stealing the freedoms of their people away from them, of sending troops to die in a war that has no basis in fact, that reaks of expansionism, I fear a nation that shows no respect for International law and the UN (and no I'm not talking about Israel but I could be...) and acts as it sees fit, forcing a polarisation of beliefs on a global scale; making people choose sides rather than work together for the common good.

This post and others like it across the blogsphere only helps to push this 'us against them' agenda and feeds the fire of seperation and ignorance.

Our governments are resonsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of innocent people, whether by direct force or using proxy forces; that far out way any imaginary tide of Islam.

I didn't sleep through 9/11 but Bush certainly did and you are picking the wrong target for your vengeful rage and xenophobia.

As for people who live 'where this shit happens' this brings me neatly on to the fabrication that is contained in this work of propaganda: I live in the UK yet seem to have slept through numerous acts of terror you've put on the map, I also spend a great deal of time in France and once again, terror attacks seemed to have happened that I had no knowledge of.

This bias not only leaves your 'wonderful bit of research' as a tool for hate but also utterly useless.

And finally, there was me thinking you're just a racist but then you slip in the 'bend over' bit and now it all becomes clear.

This is a forum for right-wing hate and prejudice and I shall visit often to disprove much of what you portray as fact.

One of your readers, called Everett Parker, decided to email me more of this nonsense and told me to return to read how my arguement had been destroyed.

I return to find a desultory paragraph that only enhances the level of entrenchment.

Why no dialogue? There seems to be a lot of fear of voices that differ from yours, Mr Parker seems obsessed that such voices threaten the safety of the US and their was me thinking is was the people running the country.

I think it's sad if you feel you have to ban me when all I offer is a voice of dissent.

Doesn't the destruction of dissent worry you? Do you not want open debate on matters such as these?

You seem to have included border disputes between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the civil war in Sri Lanka between the Hindu Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, acts of violent opposition to the Nigerian army and foreign oil companies, and an assymetrical war fought for Kosovar independence in your list of Islamic terrorism.

Therefore, it seems to me that the point of this map is rhetorical, rather than informational. Had you wanted to provide useful information, you should have disentangled the reasons for each act of violence and not included acts which had no business being counted.

Kerfuffles lives between the “bloody borders” of "Grid Square #07-03, Affected Country: USA", and she remembers all too well the terrorism of each listed attack. Every blogger of our genre should link to "The Bloody Borders Project". Great work Baron and Dymphna.

They are as Hindu as the Columbian/Peruvian Leftist guerrillas are Christian.

Actually, the LTTE is a leftist/Socialist Organisation and its upper ranks are Catholic Christians. Its chief Ideology, Anton Balasingham is a Christian too. Not to mention, LTTE's chief commander, Prabhakaran's wife is a Catholic.

Yes, most of the cadre are Hindus, but religion is of no significance in that organisation. They can instead be termed as a Tamil Linguistic Organisation.

yeah, but what about the new klans ?what about those died by their acts in iraq, afganistan, vietnam, japan, ........ ah i forgot, they are either infidels or not purely whites, they deserve deat isn't that ?